Days ahead of the scheduled Dec. 11 hearing in Gatineau, Que., interest in the showdown has been revived as Corus Entertainment, which owns OWN Canada, has provided details on its CRTC appeasement strategy.

Since the channel was licensed to a CHUM Limited venture called Canadian Learning Television, it is required to focus on educational programming. Corus was required to maintain that education focus when it bought the channel for $73 million in 2008 and rebranded it Viva.

The programming, aimed at boomer women, retained a vague association with accredited institutions across the country — claiming that watching Viva would somehow help you score credit for courses in cooking or criminology — but the higher-profile Oprah association drew more attention to the lack of compliance.

Corus has now revealed the shows it plans to introduce to the OWN lineup to live up to its requirement, as reported by The Globe and Mail. Original productions with names like E-Commerce Done Right and The History of Canadian Art sound like the kind of Canadian content lampooned over 30 years ago by SCTV.

But in its effort to re-establish itself as more consumer-friendly, under the direction of new chairman Jean-Pierre Blais, the CRTC may also have to concede that the license for a for-profit educational channel that launched in 1999 has little relevance to the media landscape of 2012.